Stronger Than Jesus, A Camp

Livescribe && OS X = true, HWR && PC == true

Finally!

Livescribe Pulse supports Mac OS X!

The Business Wire article also breaks the news that hand writing recognition will finally be available through Vision Objects MyScript for Livescribe!

Is that based on MyScript Notes? Only PC?

I wonder how the MyScript integration with the Livescribe desktop is done? Will the MyScript app read the .afd files or is it more tightly integrated using the forthcoming "Desktop SDK"? It will be really interesting to see!

Engadget blog post

Business Wire

Update

Livescribe's press release

Livescribe shipping to Sweden

Livescribe has started to ship the Pulse outside the US.

To accommodate other international requests, Amazon US is currently shipping overseas to the following countries: Austria, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Arab Emirate.

Congratulations Livescribe

The Pulse is number 4 on Popular Mechanics Top 10 Most Brilliant Gadgets of the Year!

Great work eveyone at Livescribe! Let's hope that 2009 brings even more success!

Livescribe Pulse reviewed in swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter

There is a short review of the Livescribe Pulse in the swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter today:

Anteckna snabbare med vassa pennan (Take notes faster with a sharp pen)

They seem to be quite impressed with the pen and the paper replay functionality. The only negative being that you have to wear the earplugs for the best sound recording. They would have preferred a solution with a external microphone that could be placed on a table.

They also note that the Pulse isn't available in Europe (yet) and cites that Livescribe refers to Amazon for buying and importing the pen. I guess they (Livescribe and Dagens Nyheter) missed the following info on Amazon:

Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.

Ubiquity

Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs was released in an alpha the other day.


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Photosynth

Microsoft have released the first online version of Photosynth!

Read David Pogue's review in NYTimes.

Read my previous entries about Photosynth.

Standing Next To Me, The Last Shadow Puppets

Better Place

I've just read a great article about Better Place in Wired. Fascinating how such a simple idea have been ignored until now. And then suddenly someone thinks outside the box. And boom!

Better Place (website)
Better Place (Wikipedia)

Your Song, Elton John

Burn Your Burndown Charts

Burn Your Burndown Charts is an interesting post by Jurgen Appelo at the excellent site Agile Software Development. It describes some alternatives to the traditional burndown chart in Scrum.

He runs another interesting blog as well at NOOP.NL.

WPF tutorial

Scott Hanselman has written a fun little WPF tutorial by implementing a kids game called BabySmash.

Books you need to buy 2

It's time to update my original list of essential books you need as a (windows) programmer. I'll add some titles the coming weeks.

General
Software Fundamentals: Collected Papers, David L. Parnas
Code Complete, Steve McConnell 2004
The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt, David Thomas, 1999

Development Processes
Applying UML and Patterns, 3d edition, Craig Larman 2004
Agile and Iterative Developmen: A Manager's Guide, Craig Larman 2003
Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices, Robert C. Martin
The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master, Andrew Hunt, David Thomas
Practices of an Agile Developer: Working in the real world, Venkat Subramaniam, Andy Hunt

Design Patterns
Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides
Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design, Jenifer Tidwell, 2005

Refactoring
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, Don Roberts
Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Michael Feathers

C++
The C++ Programming Language, Bjarne Stroustrup

COM
Essential COM, Don Box 1997
Inside Com (Microsoft Programming Series), Dale Rogerson 1997
ATL Internals (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series), Brent E. Rector, Chris Sells 1999
Programming Distributed Applications With Com & Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0, Ted Pattison

Windows
Programming Windows, Charles Petzold 1998
Programming Windows With MFC, Jeff Prosise 1999

MFC
MFC Internals: Inside the Microsoft(c) Foundation Class Architecture, George Shepherd 1996

Computer Security
Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C, Bruce Schneier 1995
Building Secure Software, Gary McGraw 2001
Exploiting Software, Gary McGraw 2004
Software Security: Building Security In (Paperback), Gary McGraw 2006
Writing Secure Code, Michael Howard 2002
Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++, Matt Messier, John Viega 2003

OpenSSL, SSL, TLS
Network Security with OpenSSL, Pravir Chandra, Matt Messier, John Viega 2002
SSL and TLS, Eric Rescorla 2000

WPF
Programming WPF, Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths, 2nd Ed, 2007

Windows debugging
Advanced Windows Debugging, Mario Hewardt, Daniel Pravat, 2007

Pork and Beans, Weezer

Weezer's latest single is quite good. And fun. Sorry to say the Red Album isn't as good as the exceptional Pinkerton and Blue Album. But Weezer always rocks!

CUDA

Here are some interesting articles about CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture):

Are you interested in getting orders-of-magnitude performance increases over standard multi-core processors, while programming with a high-level language such as C? And would you like that capability to scale across many devices as well?

Rob Farber, Dr. Dobb´s

CUDA, Supercomputing for the Masses: Part 1

Nvidia's CUDA: The End of the CPU?

Home, Lene Lovich

Fade to Grey, Visage

Ubuntu update

I had a good laugh yesterday reading LinuxHater's Blog. After my installation of Ubuntu the other week I thought that Linux really isn't that bad. But yesterday evening my wife was watching streaming TV on our laptop, ie Windows, and it kept freezing up. So I thought that now was the time to check out Ubuntu and see how good it was! But during boot the laptop got stuck and promted BusyBox and initramfs. So I gave up and uninstalled Ubuntu immediately. I mean, WTF!

Shoreline, Broder Daniel

Not Forever, Popsicle

Patterns in Practice

Patterns in Practice is a new article series in MSDN Magazine. It starts off with the Open Closed Principle. Read my previous post about programming principles.

Google goes Photosynth

Google has implemented Look Around in Panoramio and it is a photo technology very reminiscent of Microsoft Photosynth. Read my previous post as well.

Hitta 3D

This is extremely cool map technology rivaling what is done both at Microsoft and Google.

Hitta 3D

You can currently find lots and lots of ugly graphics in the view but I am anyway surprised at how good the rendering is based only on automatic data prcessing.

Ubuntu

It's is more than 10 years since I regularly used a Unix system. I have of course followed the Unix/Linux development in general over the years but have never seen a reason to head back. I work with Windows and I use Windows at home. By parents have got a Mac and I really like Mac OS X and have thought about switching to this platform in the future.

Anyway the other day I read about Ubuntu 8.04 and Wubi and decided to give it a try.

First I installed it on my old Shuttle SB81P configured with one IDE disk, one SATA and a Powercolor 800XL. Everything went extremely well and I had my Ubuntu up and running after approx. 30 minutes. The default installation works fine and I haven't bothered to check what packages actually got installed.

Secondly I installed it on my even older laptop Acer Travelmate 632LC. This machine has some integrated Geforce2 graphics and an old disk that regularly gives me trouble. The first install got disk problems half way through. I cancelled the installation and got the choice to save the downloaded data in a backup. I tried once more and now the install went fine. But when booting up the first time the machine hung when formatting swap disk. I found an advice to rename the swap disk (C:\ubuntu\disks\swap.disk -> C:\ubuntu\disks\noswap.disk ) and restart so I tried that and now it booted up nicely! (Afterwards I found this error description that sounds like my error, I haven't verified the fix though.) Everything seemed to work fine and I got the option to upgrade the video drivers by the system since the Geforce2 obviously was detected. I accepted this and rebooted. Now the 2D performance became totally unacceptable. I was a lot worse than the default drivers. The fix for this was to uninstall the nvidia-glx drivers and install the nvidia-glx-legacy drivers. This was simple using the Synaptic Package manager.

Most impressive was that Ubuntu/Wubi detected my Netgear WG511 wireless adapter on my laptop and got it running without a problem!

So now I got Ubuntu on two machines at home. I have tried some basic functions like using the Firefox browser, the Open Office package and the default media player. Everything works fine but I can't see one reason to stop using Windows! It was a fun excercise though!

Update
Perhaps I'll try using MonoDevelop for some .NET (Mono) development on this platform in the future to see how it compares with the express versions of Visual Studio.

Suicide is Painless, Manic Street Preachers

Livescribe Pulse review roundup

PC Magazine

..., the Smartpen is easily the best implementation of microdot and audio/image capture technology to date. It's easy to use and small enough not to look or feel ridiculous in your hands. If Livescribe updates the desktop software with some intelligent indexing features and perhaps adds a clip to the pen, so it stops rolling off my desk, I think the Pulse Smartpen could become an essential investment for any student, businessperson, or journalist.

Gearlog

The Pulse Smartpen does its main job extremely well, bringing traditional note taking and voice recording together while making both immensely more useful. There's no reason that any student or note-taker shouldn't go out and buy one of these right now.

USA Today

Pulse isn't perfect or for everyone. But in producing this sharp gadget, Livescribe is mostly flaunting the write stuff.

MSNBC

I'm sold.

WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft Research has done it again! Check out WorldWide Telescope. Some more info.

Gizmodo reviews the Pulse Smartpen

Gizmodo reviews the Pulse Smartpen.

The Livescribe Pulse is an amazing piece of tech, and I enjoy using it, but has an admittedly limited appeal. I'd love to see more creative and functional uses implemented with future "apps," and a touch of refinement in the current interface. But this is recommended for anyone who takes a lot of notes.

David Pogue reviews the Pulse Smartpen

David Pogue reviews the Pulse Smartpen.

Now, you may wonder how paper computing will take off when its principal weapon exhibits so many 1.0 start-up stumbles. And if you’re like most people, you might regard the Pulse pen as a technology in search of a purpose — or a purchase that will wind up, forgotten, in the back of your gadget drawer.

But if you’re in the Pulse’s target audience — people who regularly take handwritten notes during lectures, classes, meetings, presentations or even concerts — you have a lot to look forward to. Even if the Pulse never becomes more than a one-trick pony, it’s a heckuva good trick. And for society’s long-suffering subset of note takers, at least, it may be the first convincing evidence that the pen has finally gone digital.

Baby Hates Me, Danko Jones

Volta

I seem to have forgotten to mention Volta from Microsoft Live Labs.

The Volta technology preview is a developer toolset that enables you to build multi-tier web applications by applying familiar techniques and patterns. First, design and build your application as a .NET client application, then assign the portions of the application to run on the server and the client tiers late in the development process. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together.

Cool!

Here is an interesting article comparing Volta with Googles GWT.

Live Mesh

Check out Live Mesh from Microsoft. And especially the developer information. This seems to be another real cool technology from Microsoft!

Update
Here is an interesting blog post by Mike Zintel at the Live Mesh team.

Don't blow it

Get a head start at your next job interview:

Get that job at Google, a great article by Steve Yegge on his blog.

Technical Interview Questions (use the sitemap for best overview)

Update

Also read Joel's articles about conducting interviews:

The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)

The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing (original)

and Steve's comment to them.

Amazon Web Services

There is a interesting article in the May issue of Wired about Amazon and the history of its Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Zelda Movie Trailer

Zelda Movie Trailer

Hahahahahaha!

Livescribe is shipping!

Finally!

http://www.livescribe.com/blog/

Congratulations to the Livescribe team! I had my doubts about that shipping date due to the lack of updates from Livescribe but they seem to have made it. Even though it is in "limited volume".

So now I just want to ask the selected ones that get a Pulse in the next week(?) or so, post a review! And unboxing on youtube of course!

Thanks! And once more, congratulations to the Livescribe team!

PhotoZoom

What can I say except PhotoZoom!

And, well, Microsoft rules. If you didn't know already.

Goodbye Little Boy, The Triffids

Livescribe customer relations

Livescribe seems to be betting hard on viral campaigns by using the web, fun videos, a blog and a presence on Facebook. Sorry to say the Facebook forums as well as the comments section on the Livescribe blog are strangely absent of Livescribe representatives. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of people are offering their thoughts about the product and are asking for more information but they are all ignored by Livescribe.

I understand that if you are working 100+ hours you don't have too much time to spend on tasks that don't are immediately related to the upcoming release. But I think there is a very big risk here that you are alienating your biggest fans even before you have released your product. So please let someone help Karen Lee too answer some of the comments on your forums and blog! We are dying to get some relevant information from developers as well as customer relations people.

Here is a sad example from your blogs comment section:

Mike says:
...
Anyway, I (kinda) can understand the delays, but what I don’t understand is why there is such a poor (potential) customer support here in the blog?
...

klee (Karen Lee from Livescribe) says:
We read all your blog comments and want to thank you for your patience and support. We also understand your frustration and hear your concerns about the shipping date for Pulse.

We are still planning to start shipping by March 31st. Anyone who has preordered the Pulse smartpen will be sent an email with instructions to complete your purchase in the coming weeks.

Thanks again for your comments, suggestions and ideas.

what?! says:
Klee…You’ve served to do nothing except state the equivalent of “let them eat cake”

We read your blog comments….but we don’t care
We hear your concerns….but are doing nothing about them
We are still planning to start shipping by March 31st….but won’t offer any details on progress
Thanks again for your comments…but we’ve ignored them and not replied to a single suggestion

Goodbye LiveScribe…maybe when you mature

Update! Update! Update!
If you (ie. Livescribe) need a person for professional and sincere Livescribe evangelism I hope you know who to contact?! ;)

Livescribe on NBC

Ok there is a Fly Fusion in the image above but the video is mainly about the Pulse!

Deep Zoom

Seadragon changes name to Deep Zoom and is available to the public through Silverlight 2.

Download the Deep Zoom Composer now. If only I had the time to play with this...

Microsoft rules.

Google Web Toolkit Tutorial

The January 2008 issue of Dr. Dobb's has an excellent GWT tutorial in it by Adam Houghton and Ed Burnette!

Braindump++

From wikipedia:

Generally, the transfer of a large quantity of information from one person to another or to a piece of paper can be referred to as a 'brain dump'.

So do you recognize having important information from co-workers saved like this? On a piece of paper that once told you all the secrets about some product or project but now, when you look at it 2 years later, it is just some boxes with random lines between them and unrecognizable text items written here and there??

So come the revolution, Braindump++ !

Imagine what it would be to once more see these boxes and lines being drawn and actually listen to the explanations that were given at the time! That is what doing brain dumps with the Livescribe smart pen will be like!


I created a really really crappy demo of the future using the Facebook app Livescribe Wall. I drew the image using my mouse. But please, don't think about how crappy it is, just compare the static image below with the one given to you when you follow the link.

Interesting article about the Livescribe smartpen

An electronic pen that listens and talks back is an interesting article about the Livescribe smartpen. Published in the January issue of IEEE Spectrum.

It will be great to see what the student/consumer response is when it is finally launched later this month!