creativity

Nov 15 2008   4:21PM GMT

g-speak: Oblong brings the “Minority Report” operating system to science reality

Posted by: Alexander Howard
operating systems, virtual, media, data, Technology, fun, video, Internet, multimedia, innovation, cool, culture, interesting, futurism, invention, creativity, entrepeneurship, interactive media, tool, buzz, science, virtual reality, interface, display, geek, demonstration, immersive 3D worlds

William Gibson noted recently that the cyberpunk fiction he’d been writing over the past quarter century has now become science fact. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country are both set in near-futures with technology and social norms that are only a slight extension of the complex technological realities of the present. The neural shunt that jacks you into the network he imagined in Neuromancer hasn’t quite have arrived yet but some humans now have direct brain-computer interfaces implanted in their brains.

Brad Feld appreciates this relationship between science fiction and fact as few others do. As he writes in ‘Science Fact‘ on Oblong’s web blog, the future of human-computer interaction is looking breathtaking. And, while the genetically-engineering precognitive humans Philip K. Dick imagined in “Minority Report” in 1956 haven’t arrived yet, g-speak certainly has.

g-speak is a spatial operating environment from Oblong Industries that combines a gestural interface, DLP projectors and ‘recombinant networking.” It’s modeled upon the virtual OS operated by Precrime Agent John Anderton in Minority Report, the film adaptation of Dick’s short story.

That connection is no accident. The science adviser that Spielberg consulted for the film, John Underkoffler, has been quietly busy since the film’s premiere in 2002. A few stories have popped up over the years, to be sure, but since Oblong Industries was founded in the research in 2006 he and other technologists have advanced the technology considerably, as you’ll see in the video below.

Once you’ve watched it, read g-speak in slices and about the origins of Oblong in the MIT Media Lab to learn about the potential for this human-to-machine interface and the long road to bringing it into reality..

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

[Hat tip to Engadget's Josh Topolsky and Jamie.]

Embedded below is a 2007 report on g-speak featuring an interview with Underkoffler.

Aug 19 2008   12:42AM GMT

Bizzwords: Business lingo describes the state and style of the information age

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Web 2.0, Technology, fun, Internet, commentary, cool, culture, college, crowdsourcing, futurism, exploration, WhatIs.com, creativity, Silicon Valley, wiki, conversation, widgets, social networking, blogging, humor, history, communications, buzzword, word meanings, languages, geek

Isn’t it amazing how the business lingo of the times reflects the technologies, anxieties and energies of a period? My local NPR station, WBUR, featured a terrific episode of On Point this past June, hosted by one Tom Ashbrook, that was all precisely this topic, discussing and poking gentle fun at business lingo. You can listen to it on Odeo or head over to the New Business Lingo at OnPointRadio.org.

[Image Credit: Despotes]

There are some wonderful “bizzwords” in the show, along with some historical perspective. As the show description notes:

Every walk of life has its lingo. Its buzzwords and catchphrases. American business has its own colorful menagerie of slang, and always has — from bulls and bears, to bootstraps, and 800-pound gorillas, and fish in a barrel.

But buzzwords and catchphrases change. They turn over and make way for newcomers.

And when they do, in American business, they may tell us something about where we and our economy are headed.

If you lived through the business world of the 80s, you no doubt encountered a consultant or executive who talked about “re-engineering business processes” or finding “synergies” between different products.

Cube farmers could be depended upon to be seen “prairie dogging” when something happened around the office. Networking at cocktail parties was hot.  Blamestormers might be Dilberted. Seagull managers might fly in to observe their microserfs, make a lot of noise, poop over everything and then leave.

If you worked in technology, you probably had a PC. As a hacker, you might have laughed about clueless users needed treeware. Everyone worried about career-limiting moves (CLMs) that might result from a bad click or command, propagating in an ohnosecond.

And of course, like, ya know, everything was, like, totally rad, dude.

In the 90s, couch potatoes turned to mouse potatoes as office workers all jumped on the Information Superhighway. Wired happily documented it all in its Jargon Watch column. By the end of the decade, i-everything and e-anything created one of the great tech bubbles.

Everyone wanted to go IPO. A few years later so one of the great crashes. Dotcommers became dotgoners and dotbombers. The 80/20 rule defined actionable moments after careful cost-benefit analyses. If something could be outsourced, it was. Viral marketing zipped off into email distribution lists, moving through word of mouse.

In the late ’00s (naughts), the Web 2.0 bubble has replaced the Internet bubble, as social networkers expand their social graphs, exposed to infotisements and advertorials as they blog, edit wikis and surf the blogosphere with RSS readers on iPhones. Online marketers are accountable for the ROI of every campaign. We’ve crowdsourced many actions and processes, whereever feasible, bending to the wisdom of the crowd and selling to the long tail.

Google is both a verb and a noun, along with nearly every conceivable form in between. Despite the company’s best efforts, google has even escaped proper noun status in many communities. The President calls it “the Google.”  The senior senator from Arizona talks about “a google.” The junior senator  from Illinois (and his search committee) Googled potential vice-presidential candidates. As billions of revenue from search adverstising each quarter streaming in to the Internet giant, it’s clear we’re a culture of Googlers googling each other, egosurfing away.

We’re also frazzing, dangerously close to overload by switching from email to cell phone to IM to text messages to meetings to Twitter and the Web.

Steeped in media from satellite and cable news networks, DVRs, DVD-players, on-demand programming and Web video, there’s even a danger of what sociologist Emile Durkheim might have identified as a kind of digital anomie, colorfully described as “Dorito Syndrome” — a persistent feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness, regardless of consumption.

No matter how much screensucking you do, there’s always more. Lisa Belkin wrote about a number of these in the New York Times in 2006 in Overly Wired.

Widgets are everywhere now, of course, and may be anything from a small gadget to an embeddable module in an iGoogle page to a downloadable desktop application or even (gasp) an esoteric mechanical device. (Guinness drinkers have their own version, of course.)

The green computing wave spurred by skyrocketing energy costs from power-hungry data centers has spawned many biologically-themed terms.

Greenwashing, astroturfing and blacksurfing have all entered the lexicon. Every product seems to live in its own ecosystem.

Freemium business models now may promote coopetition between fierce competitors, perhaps using telepresence rooms that are far too expensive for standard percussive maintenance.

Under such conditions, “matadors” (people skilled at dodging assignments or responsibility) have little chance of scraping by, as the presence technologies, pervasive computing and “status message culture” adopted by the millenials puts “slacking” firmly into the lexicon of decades-past.

And, of course, we’re all increasingly computing in the cloud now.

As we near the end of this decade, the buzzwords of the ’10s have yet to be coined and collectively sampled, savored and entered into the lexicons maintained by Merriam-Webster, the Oxford Englsh Dictionary and, of course, the best online IT encyclopedia online. (Shameless plug).

Some will end up as sniglets, humorous oddities of cultures past. Other words will always remind the culture at large of a certain time and place.

Here’s hoping we can improve on vlog, blook and webinar.

If you have an idea of what lingo might define the next decade of business, let me know at ahoward@techtarget.com or leave a comment.

Jul 18 2008   11:40AM GMT

Bit.ly: A better URL shortener for developers, data geeks and microbloggers

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, Web 2.0, programming, software, data, Technology, Web services, Internet, innovation, useful, cool, hacks, free, public domain, feeds, social bookmarking, social publishing, design, creativity, reviews, startup, resource, collaboration, community, WhatIs.com Editor's Award, code, tracking, traffic, Web analytics, tool, Web design, blogging, communications, Web applications, statistics, interface, geek

The old adage about not reinventing the wheel doesn’t quite extend to Web applications. URL shorteners may have been around for years but there is plenty of room for improvement. This list of 68 URL shorteners from Honkiat.com show both the competition in the space and the need for innovation. There’s certainly plenty of demand: TinyURL.com, for instance, which has been around since 2002, purports to receive over 1.5 billion hits a month. While that seems a little high, the emergence of character-limited microblogging platforms like Twitter and long, forgettable Web addresses spit out by content management systems has resulted in a need for effective ways to simply Web addresses.

Enter bit.ly. Bit.ly was created by Betaworks, the NY-based software concern that created Summize. Summize was recently acquired by Twitter, if you’re not following the rapidly evolving Web.20 startup space.

Dave Winer used a post announcing the launch of bit.ly on scripting.net to explain why bit.ly fills a number of other needs:

“They asked what it would take for me to use bit.ly, I said: data. I need to know how many clicks each pointer got and where the clicks came from. They gave me that, and thumbnails, permanent caching of the pages I’m pointing to (goodbye linkrot) and a lot of smart stuff going on behind the scenes that we’re not ready to talk about yet. (Though we told Marshall and he explained.) Here’s the info page for this post.

And, most important, an XML/JSON interface, so I can process all that data with my own programs. Here’s the XML readout for the shortened link to this post.”You can use your own keywords to the URL, organizing your links like tags.

Winer also notes that he’s a minority investor in the service, so while you can take his words with a grain of salt, try the service out and weigh its merits for yourself.

 I will say,  however, that bit.ly is easily the best URL shortener I’ve used to date.  It accomplishes its core mission quickly and easily, converting long URLs to short ones on the bit.ly homepage or using a bookmarklet you can drag to your Web browser’s toolbar. (It’s even kinda cute; note the blowfish mascots on the right.)

If you’re a Web developer or simply a data geek, the ability to pull all of the data about a given shortened URL through a XML or JSON interface will be quite helpful for analyzing your traffic and audience behavior.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of bit.ly’s other nifty features:

• display your 15 most recent shortened URLs below the entry field
• tracking of both clicks on shortened URLS and referring pages
• an API for creating shortened URLs from web applications, which is quite useful is you’re a Web developer
• automatic creation of thumbnail images that can be displayed on a webpage next to shortened URL

If my excitement about bit.ly doesn’t move you, Marshall Kirkpatrick has posted a glowing review of bit.ly at ReadWriteWeb that thoroughly explains why bit.ly is worth a try, along with an endorsement of bit.ly’s advanced URL tracking capabilities by Lifehacker.

If you like bit.ly, please recommend it to others. The larger the bit.ly community grows, the more effective and useful this nascent index of the Semantic Web will become. That’s because bit.ly is analyzing all of the pages that its users create shortcuts to using the Open Calais semantic analysis API from Reuters. All the data gathered is available in public RSS feeds. bit.ly is also using the MetaCarta GeoParsing API to draw geolocation data out of the database of submitted links.

Jul 8 2008   11:32AM GMT

A digital nursery rhyme for online gurus and clever children of the Internet

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Apple, Technology, Web services, fun, YouTube, Internet, social bookmarking, creativity, Silicon Valley, songs, tag, social networking, Vista, humor, Web applications, Windows, word meanings, geek

Amit Agarwal posted the clever, useful graphic below over at his Digital Inspiration blog. The graphic has been making the rounds online; if anyone knows who originally created and uploaded it, please let me know so that I can properly credit him or her.

If you’re a geeky parent, this might be an upgrade on “A is for Apple.” Oh, wait. That part doesn’t change.

Most of these should be familiar to most netizens but, just in case you’re mystified, here’s a digital nursery rhyme to help you remember:

A is for Apple, user-friendly as can be

B is for Bluetooth, which connects printers to me

C is for Core Duo, a faster computer chip

D is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking trip

E is eMule, a file sharing client

F is for Facebook, a social networking giant

G is for Google, which searches most knowledge

H is for Holon, an Israeli college

I is for iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone

J is for Java, a language well-honed

K is Kazaa, another file sharing service

L is for Linux, an open source OS

M is for MSN, Microsoft’s portal

N is for Napster, which made record companies mortal

O is for Office, for presenting and writing

P is for Playstation, for gaming that’s exciting

Q is for Quicktime, used for videos large and small

R is for RSS, syndicating to us all

S is for Second Life, the 3D metaverse

T is tagging, creating folksonomies of verse

U is for USB, the universal connection

V is for Vista,  Microsoft’s OS correction

W is for Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia

X is for XP, the standard OS selection

Y is for YouTube, of online video fame

Z is for Zuma, a free silly game.

Now that you’ve relearned your ABCs,  next time won’t you sing with me?

Happy naptimes, future digerati.

Jun 10 2008   11:26AM GMT

What is a social spreadsheet? Dan Bricklin and SocialText combine wikis with workspaces at Enterprise 2.0.

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, interoperability, applications, enterprise, Internet, innovation, commentary, cool, education, learning, academics, social publishing, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, freeware, Development, community, information, productivity, spreadsheet, history, communications, interface, software development, conference, enterprise 2.0

Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, a maker of enterprise wiki software, announced the launch of a new social spreadsheet at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. In his presentation to a packed hall of technology executives, developers, media and social media mavens, Mayfield first addressed the state of Enterprise 2.0 before asking a simple question:

How can you work with structured data in an unstructured way?

He noted that the killer app of the PC generation that came of age in the 1980s was the spreadsheet, pioneered by Dan Bricklin in the form of VisiCalc. That app was what led many early adopters to buy an Apple and tap into the productivity gains brokered by the IT revolution.

Spreadsheets are now used for communication, lists, tables and two-dimensional layout. Mayfield asserted that they’re the most common database on the planet.

Workers collaborated originally by using sneakernet and floppy disks to share spreadsheets.

Now, we play “email volleyball with attachments” — a descriptive and all too accurate summation of how files ping pong around a network, introducing version control issues, 90% error rates. As Ross sees it, reverse engineering a spreadsheet on a web page misses the potential.

For the past two years, Socialtext has been working with Dan Bricklin to combine the usability and collaborative power of a wiki with the organization and flexibility of a spreadsheet. Meet the social spreadsheet, a “multi-user wiki-based spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity.”

The software is able to cross organizational, structural, geographical and temporal boundaries. In the short video below, (available on Viddler for sharing or on YouTube), Dan Bricklin explains what a social spreadsheet is, how it works, how he was involved in the project and what users can expect from the software.

The social spreadsheet is open sourced and will be used in XOs for the One Laptop Per Child project worldwide, providing access to a quintessential IT tool for farmers, village merchants, businessmen, teachers and thousands of other individuals in the developing world.

Thanks again to Dan Bricklin for taking the time to talk to WhatIs.com.

Apr 30 2008   6:03PM GMT

May 1st is RSS Awareness Day. Have you checked your feeds today?

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Web 2.0, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, podcasting, blog, cool, learning, free, feeds, event, creativity, screencast, tracking, tool, howto, blogging, RSS, fundamentals, communications, demonstration

Are you hip to Really Simple Syndication? If you’re still behind on the adoption curve, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day.

Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

Apr 23 2008   9:27AM GMT

Better Education Through Open Source Robots

Posted by: Alexander Howard
open source, fun, cool, education, learning, courses, academics, design, invention, robotics, creativity, downloads, collaboration, tutorial, howto, blogging, fundamentals, artificial intelligence, conference

Heather Johnson is guest blogging at WhatIs.com this week. Heather is a freelance writer, as well as a monthly contributor for OEDb, a site that helps students select among accredited online schools. She invites comments and freelancing job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

Apr 23 2008   8:46AM GMT

Video: Exploring presence technology with tele-immersive dance in cyberspace

Posted by: Alexander Howard
applications, virtual, media, Technology, fun, video, YouTube, new media, Internet, innovation, cool, culture, college, learning, academics, interesting, invention, event, creativity, collaboration, participation, interactive media, music, mashup, science, virtual reality, geek, demonstration

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

From the show notes on YouTube:

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

Mar 31 2008   11:58PM GMT

Happy April Fools’ Day 2008: A roundup of the Web’s best jokes, hoaxes and lies

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Google, Web 2.0, media, fun, Internet, commentary, culture, interesting, event, creativity, resource, community, Rails, humor, history, geek

In 2008, April Fools’ Day Jokes are everywhere. Here’s a roundup list of some of the best/worst of the lot.

Gday, MATE, from Google Australia. Future search! A great follow-up from the company that has brought us Google MentalPlex and PigeonRank technologies, along with openings for Googlelunaplex on the moon and a smart-drink called GoogleGulp! MATE™ stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Google’s prank in the US, Google Custom Time, involves messing about with time as well, utilizing “an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).” Send your emails back in time! Amaze your friends!

YouTube links will RickRoll you. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia link to aRick Astley video. If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s ‘ Never Gonna Give You Up.’

TechCrunch sues Facebook for $25 million in Statutory Damages. You have to get to the end before the jokiness shows up. Can you tell Michael is a lawyer?

Shakespeare Ghost Writer. Because everyone needs the bard.

Pay Per Tweet from Problogger. This one spawned some pretty funny reactions on Twitter when it was announc

Even our friends over at CNET are getting into the fun, reporting that TechCrunch has acquired TigerBeat and renamed it CrunchKids.

Watch out, however, as there’s a major backlash brewing in the blogosphere. ValleyWag’s Paul Boutin captured the zeitgeist quite succintly in Your April Fools’ Prank Sucks:

April Fools’ Day in tech has devolved over the past two decades into lazy online hoaxes… Worse, the goal is no longer in-house camaraderie, but Internet publicity. Some companies notify the press of their hoaxes a week early, in hopes of securing coverage. We thought about running their emails as they came in, just to pop their bubbles. But there’s no laugh in giving away an unfunny joke. Look, if you want attention, why not ship a real product? That seems easier.

Anil Dash elaborated further, stating that Your April Fools’ Day Joke Continues to Suck.

Ouch. Ok, guys. We get it. But I’m still laughing. I’ve even posted a prank played upon me from last year on the right, a well-implemented foiling of my desk and everything on it.

If you’re hungry for more, there are some hoary classics out there, like John C. Dvorak’s Drunk Modeming and April Fools’ Phone from Penn & Teller. WhatIs.com’s joke for the day was Electricity over IP , if you missed it. Michael Morisey had some fun at Cisco’s expense over at SearchNetworking.com, too. Make sure to read Cisco re-thinks Layer 8 networking with green components to learn about The Human-Like Network.

Slashdot is having a merry time with an April Fools’ Day Prank Roundup thread that includes a five pranks you can build in the office, Wired’s top 10 practical jokes for nerds, Lifehacker’s Top 10 harmless geek pranks and Jack Shafer’s guide over at Slate.com on how to protect yourself from the media’s prankish habits. Jack linked to the Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes Of All Time, which shouldn’t be missed.

The folks over at /. did miss a few, however.

• ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st
• Ask Metafilter is collecting suggestions for great office pranks
• PCWorld has a list of the 10 Ten April Fools’ Day websites, many of which you’ll see above

Unfortunately, I have work to do (a host of new definitions, naturally) but Patrick Altoft is liveblogging April Fools’ Day 2008. Just check in with him to see what’s new. April Fools’ Day on the Web is doing a great job of cataloging new pranks as well.

***
UPDATE: I couldn’t resist. Thanks to a tweet from Dan Sandler, I learned about the announcement of a Legend of Zelda movie.

UPDATE: I think this one takes the cake for most chutzpah, given that both parties are publicly traded: Infoworld announces that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a buyout price.

UPDATE: And as the day comes to a close, Wikipedia’s entry for April 1, 2008 has over 158 different hoaxes and jokes that were made in the news media, in sports, in video games, on websites, on television, in podcasts, and on the radio.

I bet my friend Brian’s favorite is the report from Chicago Public Radio that “Major League Baseball has retroactively awarded the 1945 World Series title to the Chicago Cubs, due to an alleged ineligible playere appearing on the roster of the Detroit Tigers.”

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on some Spazztroids to munch on while I queue up my Betamax to HD-DVD Converter to watch old episodes of the Muppet Show. (Thanks, Thinkgeek!) I hope they can distract me from the USB Pregnancy Test I’m giving my PC.

Mar 12 2008   10:53AM GMT

Video: RFID Pet Food Access System

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Audio, innovation, cool, hacks, interesting, invention, creativity, gadgets, RFID, authentication

This canine version of access control combines radio transmitters with a high pitched warning signal to keep each dog away from the other’s bowl. The scenario is similar to many that role-based access control (RBAC) solves in an enterprise.

Unfortunately, programmers would still have to eat their own dogfood.

I wonder if this would help keep my roommate out of my beer.