Kindle DX Review

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 …

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Petition to Apple to Create/Improve APIs to Allow Augmented Reality Apps on the iPhone

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 …

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iPhone 3Gs Embeds Heading (Not Orientation) in EXIF Metadata

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 …

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iPhone 3Gs Encodes Camera Orientation in EXIF (?)

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 …

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DasBlog Links Finally Rewritten

Driven by the mocking of a colleague for never having done the stupid gruntwork of rewriting my old DasBlog-based permalinks, I stole Jon Udell's python code and ran it over the 8+ year history of Knowing.net. I think it mostly worked, although internal links between posts remain broken, since …

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[76702,706], signing off...

CompuServe Classic is shutting down. I had no idea they were still extant. I wonder if the CLMFORUM and AIEXPERT message boards are archived...

Coincidentally, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of my moving to the San Francisco Bay Area to become Product Review Editor at Computer Language and AI Expert …

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Very High-Res Moon Image

Amateur astrophotographers recorded more than 1TB of data in the creation of this high-res image of the surface of the moon. Pretty.

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Let He Who Has Never Compiled Untested Cast The First Stone

Tim Bray has a good post about "Test-Driven Heresy," in which he admits failing to live up to the ideal of writing tests firsts and only writing enough code to pass a test.

I'm Catholic in my test-driven beliefs, which is to say that I am a terrible sinner, but …

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