Into the Void

Just found this interesting Wii Wii game on Thinkgeek. According to the blurb on the box,

“Super Pii Pii Brothers promotes good bathroom skills and allows women to experience for the first time the pleasure of urinating while standing.”

Awesome!

“MindManager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.”

Email about using mapping software to create linear procedures for engineering processes.

—– Original Message —–
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 7:21 PM
Subject: mindthingy

This application is for hierarchies. The design process is linear-sequential. What you need is a simple checklist.

1. Draw preti pixchrs
2. add part nubmers
3. etc

Mind Manager: Linear Thinking takes you straight to the expected.

“Say hello to free-form thinking. Your brain doesn’t process in a linear fashion. Neither does Mindjet. Now you can think visually with dynamic layers of information displayed in a limitless arrangement that lends clarity to any project.”

Ontology software maps interrelationships between objects and concepts in a given domain in ways that aren’t intuitive to a linear-sequential mind. I’m not sure how Mind Manager will help write a procedure because procedures are by definition linear and sequential.

If you want to bring in resources like test equipment or people then a scheduling program like Microsoft Project Standard 2007 is more in order.

I was evaluating different mind mapping software at home. I set it up so that as I ran through my Saturday morning web work it would remind me of related tasks in case I wanted to work by tool or by priority instead of running through them in sequence. As the weeks went on I found I was adding children and siblings and dropping files and links onto it, but the license ran out and I was too cheap to buy it.

Mind mapping software is easier to use from the start of a project. If you input an existing data set and impose a well-thought-out rational structure on it, you’re totally missing the point. The creative process doesn’t have a rational structure. If it did, it would be called engineering. Oh *snap!*

There is a Mind Manager viewer so that users can only view the mind map. Mind Manager also can export to pdf, html, word, ppt, etc.

There are lots of available Mind Manager maps. No matter what you need to do with a mind map, you can probalby adapt an existing map to do what you want.

Don’t forget Microsoft Office templates. I think this one, “To do list for projects,” will work just fine for a test procedure.

Found this in my error log. Apparently somebody drops nasties in people’s image directories and induce other folks to access the nasty. Fortunately the file doesn’t exist in my image directory. I can’t guess whether it was ever there, or whether the tech guys at the host removed it for me.

I see from looking online that if it were there, it would download a Bagel variant.

[Mon Jun 09 08:55:14 2008] [error] [client 63.123.82.75] script '/var/www/vhosts/.com/httpdocs/index.php' not found or unable to stat, referer: http:/.com/images/blst.php

About a year ago there was a video circulating on the net about a computer game. You all know I’m too boring for computer games, but this one had a tie-in with physical, cultural and technological evolution. You can’t beat that.

[The name, Leslie, tell them the name!] The game is called Spore. Better pre-order that puppy. It’s going to sell out fast.

You know you want it. If you think you don’t want it, go grab another can of Monster, sit your hyper little butt down and watch the 36-minute video below. In the video, developer Will Wright demonstrates an alpha version of Spore at the 2005 Game Developer’s Conference. You’ve never seen anything like this before!

So why is so cool about Spore? Well, you get to design one-celled organisms. The fun is in configuring your creations and watching them feed and grow and evolve. Give them a new limb, watch them figure out how to use it, that is, watch the software figure out how to use it! Put them together, watch them build a community, watch them build a nation. Give them technology and they’ll incorporate it into their culture.

Plus the game is published by Electronic Arts, the folks who brought us The Sims. These guys have been creating games since Commodore 64 days. I can’t remember being this psyched over a silly computer game. I pre-ordered it and am waiting waiting waiting impatiently for the release date.

I’ve been playing with the .mobi stuff and discovered that 2D codes have a use other than to count packs of cigarettes. I can put my web site URL into a QR-Code or a ShotCode, print it on stickers, and stick the stickers to things. Then folks can point their cellphone cameras at the code block and the URL will show up in their phone as a clickable hypertext link.

I was thinking I could sell my bumperstickers that way, put the QR-Code on them.

There is a nice java app for cell phones at QuickMark Mobile Barcode – Web Site QuickMark. This app also reads SemaCode. Some fun! QR-Code even has error correction built in so that if the code block is torn or partly obliterated the app can still get the information out of it.

Create your own code with the QR-Code Generator.

Another 2D code is ShotCode. This one is targeted for advertisers. You have the option of logging all kinds of information about the cell phone and user.

Did Text-Messaging Lead to N.Y. Crash?

Take a giggly cheerleader. Give her a Cinderella driver’s license, an SUV and a cell phone. Then throw four more cheerleaders in the vehicle with her. What do you get? Well, moms and dads, you get a fiery crash.

My cell phone account gives me a complete list of all calls and text messages sent and received from the three phones on the account. The girl’s parents had to have a clue. I won’t even go into the utter foolishness of putting a new driver at the wheel of an large inertial mass. “We got it for safety,” they’ll tell you. Well, the safest vehicle is one that has an attentive driver.

YouTube – Robot Ride

Part of my engineering curriculum was a very fun hands-on robotics course. A robot like this one can move so fast that you don’t have time to get out of its way. Factories that use robotics will have black-and-yellow danger lines on the floor around around each workstation and flashing lights on top of the robots. The factory floor looks like a crazy Christmas show, especially when the lights are low.

A workstation ideally is defined as the maximum reach of the robot, not the extents of its motion in a given job, so that if there is a mechanical failure or a glitch in the program nobody gets surprised.

For the clueless, there are also multiple emergency stop switches. I can’t tell whether the fellow twirling around on the robot-ride end effector in this video has an emergency stop switch within reach. I kind of doubt it. Not that he’d have time to actually use it.

Breaking the rules is fun.

EE Times: Star Trek’s ‘tricorder’ realized

The 20-pound, battery-powered unit combines a mass spectrometer with a desorption electrospray ionization (DESI) source.

This device, which doesn’t have a cute name yet, is a general purpose sniffer that can take samples from the air and identify just about any substance known to man. The 300+ pound explosive detectors in use now require that samples be placed in the unit, and they are looking for just a few specific, common substances.

Considering that my PDA is much smaller than the electronic tablets in the original Star Trek series, I suspect a pocket-sized version will be available soon.

MIT researchers uncover mountains of private data on discarded computers.

The article above points out that it is not enough to format your harddrive before discarding it. A format only removes directory information, it doesn’t actually remove the data. In 2003, some MIT students obtained 158 used hard drives from eBay and other sources. Most of these drives had recoverable data, and some weren’t even erased. One drive appeared to be from an automatic teller machine and contained records of thousands of transactions.

If you’ve ever recovered data from a hosed Windows system you know this is true. Professional data recovery applications such as Norton Ghost can recover entire filesystems, while any of a number of free utilities will search out and recover family photos.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) assumes that it is possible to examine a hard drive with a very sensitive magnetic head to restore each magnetic bit to the last state it was in before an all-zeroes erase. For that reason, DoD Specification DoD 5220.22-M, “National Industrial Security Program Operating Manual”, 2/28/2006 requires seven write passes and a verification pass to ensure that the drive is sanitized.

Commercial products such as CCleaner (which is totally free, incidentally) support DoD specifications. The NSA, otherwise known as “No Such Agency,” has its own erasure specification.

I’ve always taken the stance that the best way to secure an old hard drive is to drill a few holes in the platter. I suppose a really motivated criminal could still recover partial information from it.

Maybe your best bet is to grind the platter to shavings before discarding a used hard drive.

The StressEraser is a handheld biofeedback unit. Unlike my favorite computer game, Journey to Wild Divine[

The StressEraser has a simple, no-nonsense user interface. It is really easy to use. You put your finger in the sensor, hit the “on” button, and the unit starts graphing. Once it figures you out, it starts printing pointers near the end of each inhalation. All you do is synchronize your breathing to the pointers. It helps you breathe deeply and evenly, and this, my caffeine-guzzling geek friend, is relaxation.