DIY Augmented Reality Windshield HUD

casey mentioned that he wants to investigate augmented reality. Having played with the accelerometers on my M200, I'm leary of the challenge of maintaining orientation over many integrations in a handheld or head-mounted device. On a car, though, you can auto-orient using the GPS and a roadmap and there'd be …

more ...

Tablet Context Tagging Tool and Java/SWT?

Anyone have experience using specialized input contexts with Java/SWT?

more ...

Videogames Don't Get "Darkest Before the Dawn"

I was thinking about buying the videogame "Star Wars: Empire at War" (not that I have any spare time). Anyway, I decided against it because I was sure, like most games, I'd abandon it after a few hours. And I realized that one reason I do that is because, unlike …

more ...

I Don't Understand How "Insurance Adjustments" Work

I have a high-deductible PPO medical plan: if I go to a Doctor, I pay the bill directly. It's not unusual for there to be a discount "If you pay at the time of services." Generally, it's around 25%, but sometimes it goes as high as 50%. I interpret this …

more ...

Borland Re-Org Includes Questionable Decisions

Alan Zeichick, in today's SD Times News on Thursday, observes two aspects of Borland's re-org that are troubling: "The first is combining sales and professional services together into one field operations group. The other is folding customer support into research & development."

Zeichick says: "Knowing that the goal of a sales …

more ...

Marco Cantu Ably Defends Delphi

Marco Cantu (hi, Marco!) notes my posts on Delphi and makes some very well-taken points, notably:

  • Delphi's "class helpers" are equivalent (or at least similar) to C# 3.0's "extension methods," so Delphi itself could be used as an example of my "trend away from structural explicitness";
  • There's nothing inherent …
more ...

Domain Cookies: Microsoft's Obvious Patent

Microsoft was granted patent 7,039,699 today, which on reading the claims appears to be: use a GUID as a database ID, send it back as a cookie, and share usage data between computers within the domain with access to the central database. The entire claim (that's the important …

more ...

Microsoft, Ruby, and War

In response to a post by Don Box complimenting Ruby, Patrick Logan says: "If Microsoft looks at Ruby as competition> then Microsoft has already lost the war."

I take two possible meanings from Logan's post:

  1. If Microsoft thinks Ruby is important, they're ignoring the threat to them posed by X …
more ...

Sapphire in Steel: Ruby Programming in VS2005

Huw Collingbourne turned me on to Sapphire in Steel, a Ruby programming environment implemented as a VS2005 plug-in: "Ruby In Steel 0.5.12 provides syntax sensitive code colouring and collapsing; a fully integrated interactive console which can be docked within the Visual Studio environment; integrated syntax error handling - click …

more ...

Borland Canning 300 (20%): Implications for DevCo?

The other shoe is dropping.

This was inevitable; one of the "hard decisions" that Borland and DevCo had to face. Still no word on a buyer for DevCo.

"Most of the layoffs will come from a restructuring of Borland's international operations," says the wire and I don't take the news …

more ...