Did a final training hike around Lake Geneva the other day. Five hours in the rain with full packs, 14 miles or so. Felt fairly good about it until realizing: "So instead of around a lake, it's 4000' of vertical. Take a break, put your pack on and do it …

Researchers say that tone-deafness has a physiological basis: few neural connections between ... uh ... the frammitz and whatzitz lobes.

I think I may be tone-deaf. On the other hand, I may just have been lazy in music classes (I was lazy in all my other classes). I absolutely love music but …

[Update: The first time I read the post, my take was that Jeff Atwood took at face value]{style="color: #ff0000;"} the claim that COBOL is by far the most common programming language in the world. [Subsequently, comments have pointed out he was skeptical. But I still read the post …

\$latex \pi r\^2\$

~~Huh. Must be only on WordPress.com~~
[Update]{style="color: #ff0000;"}: Requires the \$latex \LaTeX\$ plugin

My coworker Bob Amen was killed in a motorcycle accident on Thursday night, leaving behind a wife and child. He was the IT Director at one of my client's and I spoke with him daily. We'd never met in person, so the only way I really knew him was as …

From John Montgomery comes word that Microsoft's Popfly project has been cancelled. I was bullish on Popfly, predicting that it would become the power-user's entrance to Silverlight.

I have had a history of wishful thinking about "restoring the bridge between power users and programmers." I think Microsoft's Powershell is incredible …

I love my original Kindle. But the Achilles Heel of the Kindle has always been technical publications. The original Kindle does not have the screen real estate and formatting engine to properly deal with equations, graphs, and, most importantly for programmers, source code. Although it is possible to view some …

Apropos my recent discovery of camera heading in iPhone metadata comes word of a petition for Apple to create functions that would allow Augmented Reality development on the iPhone:

http://gamesalfresco.com/2009/07/02/open-letter-to-apple-let-us-augment-reality-with-the-iphone/

Augmented Reality are applications that combine computer-generated imagery (or text) with imagery generated from …

Further to last night's post and based on some carefully aligned photos, I am a little disappointed to conclude that the EXIF value GPSDirectionRef that the iPhone 3Gs inserts is (only) the camera's magnetic heading expressed as a rational number and not (as I'd hoped) the camera's 3D orientation in …

On a hunch I checked the EXIF data attached to my first photos from my new iPhone. The intriguing news is that it has values such as:

GPSImageDirection : 2535/383
GPSImageDirectionRef: T

The GpsImageDirectionRef = "T" appears to be a constant.(Update: signifies True and not Magnetic north.)

Pointing the camera …