Rui CarmoI finished my PMI training yesterday, which means that from now on I just might have a smidgeon more free time. It was fun, not just because the guy in charge clearly had his act together, but also because I teamed up with a few people from other departments (each bringing his/her experience to bear on the little project we dreamed up).
Next on my agenda are trying to practice my Mandarin more often and dreaming up ideas for product concepts in the field of mobile data services and IT (my recently having come up with one I believe to be pretty damn obvious and useful sort of kicked off a neural brainstorm that I will be pursuing in the next few days). And no, I'm not telling.
Anyway, here is my usual list of five things that struck my fancy in the past few days:
- João Bordalo's latest post shows a hand gesture control technique that I wouldn't mind see implemented using an iSight. In fact, I have to wonder why, given that pretty much all new Macs sport a built-in iSight, all that the Mac developer community has come up with up to now are EyeToy game clones.
- On the topic of gestures, anyone who's read H2G2 is just going to love this motion-controlled radio. Remember when Zaphod was trying to listen to the radio?
- Yojimbo was recenly revamped to add tag support and other niceties. But it still uses the single-file storage format that I dissected a while back, which I find too risky in many ways. Again, EagleFiler seems a lot better in that regard.
- Motorola went out and bought Good Technologies, which is interesting at a time when NTP is suing Palm and RIM is tilting a bit towards the consumer market with the Pearl. I expect fun times ahead for push e-mail.
- Being a long-time critic of the 802.11 "mess" and continuous fragmentation of what ought to be a relatively straightforward technology, I couldn't help but notice this piece on the Linksys/WRT600N 802.11n router - with storage support. The thing looks like a cross between a Cylon raider and a Mars Rover, but it might be a good replacement for my current combination of a (moderately hacked) WRT54GS and (overclocked) NSLU2. I just hope it won't be one of their crippled VxWorks boxes, since I won't buy it unless I am able to run OpenWRT on it at some point.
Oh, yeah, and all those folk complaining about Apple's Get a Mac campaign dropping the "Mac guy" need not fear. Apple Japan can always send over theirs.